Battlestar Galactica Recap: Season 4, Episode 3, “The Ties That Bind”

A friend recently, at my prompting, began watching Battlestar Galactica through from the beginning. “Hey,” he MSNed me a few days later. “You’ll never guess who my favorite character is!” After discussing the relative awesomeness of Baltar, Starbuck and Roslin in roughly that order, he then admitted, “Well, it’s Cally.” This kind of threw me for a loop. Y’see, fans HATE Cally. Hate her with a white-hot, burning passion. It would be easy enough to list all of the reasons, but let’s zero in on the number one reason for just a second here, a reason that pops up all the time when it comes to fans of anything hating one character or another (usually, in a sadly sexist fashion, when they’re females): Cally is whiny. She’s every character in every war movie who starts out the film wondering why they got involved in the first place and then learns along the way about the Greater Good and things like that. While Cally believed in the cause she was fighting for and hated the Cylons like a good human, she was still pretty pissed about all of the ways it affected her.

But what my friend said threw me because, y’see, I like Cally too. A lot.

And it’s not just because Nicki Clyne, the actress who portrays her, has a terrifically unreadable face that’s fascinating to puzzle out. It’s also not just because Clyne, all things considered, is pretty adorable and once briefly featured in a New Pornographers video (I swear). Cally was certainly a hard character to like, particularly on a show with more fascinatingly complicated female heroes like Roslin and Starbuck, but Clyne and the writers’ dedication to making Cally as unlikable as she could be, as relentlessly unhappy about the things that happened to her, seemed somehow perversely brave to me. Marriages on this show remain strange and opaque (there’s often more passion in extramarital affairs in the fleet), but the marriage between Cally and Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) was even more frustratingly opaque. Sure, we knew Cally had always loved Tyrol from afar, but they only hooked up after he beat her up. And then they had a kid? We’ve occasionally gotten into the heart of the Anders/Starbuck and Lee/Dualla marriages, and the Helo/Athena pairing makes sense, but Cally and Tyrol remained a mystery, often because Clyne herself was so opaque, an unreadable face broken every so often by a dazzling smile. I like a girl with some mystery to her.

So when I saw that Clyne had been added to the regular cast (in the “Also Starring” section at the top of the first act), I was pleased. Then, I immediately realized she would die. And die she did. But “The Ties That Bind” is probably the most Cally-centric episode of the show’s run. I’m sure that frustrated a lot of fans, but it also took us the furthest inside of both Cally herself and the Tyrol marriage than the show ever has. I’d rate it up there with the series’s best, and the only thing keeping it from being one of the top two or three episodes is how rushed it feels, since Cally has been persona non grata since at least “A Day in the Life” (when she ended up in an iron lung for largely unmemorable reasons) and really hasn’t had all that much to do since the New Caprica arc, when she was nearly executed. She perfectly fits the profile of the character a show hasn’t been able to utilize terribly well for long enough that killing them off makes sense while still holding enough shock to surprise the audience. She’s a Mrs. Landingham, in other words.

Even if Cally’s been on the sidelines for a long time, this episode got into her headspace relatively well and remarkably quickly, even if it did use the old, obvious TV trick of “This person has been suffering from a bunch of stuff for a long time, but we didn’t think to tell you until now.” Just from an excellent bit of visual shorthand (the Tyrols’ son’s light mobile glinting its stars and moons around their small room) the show conveys the way that Cally’s having trouble reconciling the fact that she got the life she always wanted with the fact that she’s completely miserable. Through a series of quick flashes of the fights the Tyrols, we see how their marriage is falling apart in the wake of the revelation that Tyrol is a Cylon and his struggles to keep that from his family and override any programming underlying his actions.

There is a scene (rather overwritten and a too-easy attempt to make acceptable the fact that Cally married someone who beat her—even if it was an accident) with Doc Cottle (Donnelly Rhodes) where Cally speaks of her life so far and is revealed to be taking mood-altering drugs. Between that and the crying child and the claustrophobia and the indifferent husband, Cally’s “whininess” takes on a whole new light. Yes, Cally has always been one who seemed to stand in the way of the show’s true heroes, wanting her way and wishing she had never signed up for the military in the first place (girl just wanted to go to dental school, after all), even if that saved her life. Cally never got what she wanted, and now that she has, it’s still not what she wants. When she gets that last bit of information, that her husband is a Cylon, when she hates Cylons more than anything (thanks, Tigh, for reminding us, as Tyrol, obviously, would know that, so there’s no good reason for you to be telling him), it makes sense that she takes her kid—a hybrid, after all—to an airlock and prepares to jettison both herself and him out of it. Battlestar usually captures the bigger headlines of the day in its drama, but it can also capture the smaller headlines that we shake our heads over—like mothers who kill their children and themselves—and somehow makes them relatable. Michael Nankin’s excellent direction and tight framing put viewers in Cally’s headspace, and the jarring editing, cutting between past and present, as Cally decides to take a wrench to her husband’s face, expertly conveys just how lost she feels. I know everyone hates Cally, but did anyone look at that last shot of her frozen face, drifting in space (after Tory sent her flying out of the airlock), and say, “Glad she’s gone”?

Cally, I think, irritates so many of us because science fiction and military fiction are two genres predicated on the idea of larger than life heroes who make the hard choices. They may have failings, but they’re huge, tragic failings that give them even more of an extraordinary quality (as this guy I knew in college that irritated me was fond of saying, “I don’t want to read fiction if it doesn’t have extraordinary characters or extraordinary situations”). It’s more comforting to watch Battlestar and imagine that we’d be Adama or Starbuck or Roslin, but the reality is that most of us would probably be Cally. We’d whine, and we’d want our way, and we’d wonder why the guy we have a crush on is interested in the hotter Asian chick and can’t see our awesome qualities. Cally’s like a character from a New Yorker short story who’s just wandered onto a spaceship, and it’s that jarring disconnect, that complete sense that this is not how the rules of the genre play out that, I think, drives a lot of fan antipathy toward her. (There’s a lot of talk on the BSG imdB boards about how Clyne is not as attractive as the other women on the show, but I’m just going to assume that reflects one of those Internet-only opinions. Most of you dudes would give your eyeteeth to date someone who looked like her, Tricia Helfer be damned.)

There was plenty of other good stuff in the episode (Battlestar seems to have its momentum back in the sense that nearly every scene features something worth commenting on), which will be touched on briefly, so as not to make this a novel. For starters, Michael Taylor’s script has very little wasted space (the scene with Cottle being among the few ones that could have been trimmed), and Nankin’s direction strips it down even further (Battlestar has been framing even more characters in doors than usual; it’s a popular directorial choice in general, of course, but it seems like the series is pushing for something with all of these door uses—thoughts?). The plot with the Cylon civil war continues to be incredible television—tonight Cavil (Dean Stockwell) commits genocide as Boomer (Grace Park) tearfully looks on (apparently, they’re having a thing, which, ew). And the series makes good use of tying Cally to the suffering Roslin (Mary McDonnell) and the increasingly messianic Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff). An exquisite scene where Adama (Edward James Olmos) reads a bad pulp novel to an ailing Roslin shows McDonnell’s full range of skills, all without her uttering a word, and Lee’s (Jamie Bamber) introduction to the world of Quorum politics is the most interesting political plot the series has had since the second season.

But what I really wanted to do once the episode ended was turn this whole piece into a love letter to Nicki Clyne and defense of Cally Henderson Tyrol, even though the episode itself is top-notch across the board. The general tone surrounding Cally has always been that of fans who wished the character would just die already so they could get on with the space opera, but in wishing to see Cally’s death, we wished to see the end of the audience proxy, the one character who behaved like most of us. Of course we had to be removed from the story at some point, because this is a grand story with grand characters, but on our way out, it was nice to get a little sense of the gravity of being us.

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Excellent article, Todd. Where some people see cowardice in Cally, I see innocence. Without the innocent to protect, the brave have nothing to fight for. Now the soldiers of the colonial fleet have one less good soul to defend.

Joan, you made a good point regarding how isolated she was. But that's more of a plot problem than a character problem.Posted by Reliable Data on 2008-04-24 22:23:00

I'm going to step in now and ask that all further comments in this thread refrain from the blatant ad hominems of recent postings. I'm keeping those here that have already been published, but please be civil from hereon out (any further comments that exhibit otherwise will be rejected or deleted).

Thank you.Posted by Keith Uhlich on 2008-04-21 19:47:00

While I agree that Cally (with a "y"? I thought it was "ie", but ok) was definitely a regular person (which is not, I think, the same as a "normal" person), I disliked her for her constant binary thinking. The series constantly reinforced that she had no mind for subtlety. For her, all Xs were always Ys. I just assumed that she was the Battlestar representative of George W's 19% approval rating. Those people are regular people, too (well, the ones who aren't Dick Cheney, who is neither), but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

But there's a class angle, too. Cally's backstory isn't that clear, but we do know she grew up poor, went into the fleet to finance professional school, married and loved the man who beat her up, murdered his ex, and showed the aforementioned with-us-or-against-us tendencies. That's some redneck shit, y'all. As a guy who grew up in the wilds of Alabama, I should probably feel a little more sympathy for her just because she's the BSG version of some of my relatives. And that's probably why I think she deserved better than she got, but that doesn't mean I'm all that sorry to see her go.

Anyway, when she took her kid (Nick? Jack-Jack? I forget) into the airlock, I thought the BSG writers were shooting for Greek tragedy, and Cally was their Medea. Didn't turn out that way, though. Does anyone else wonder if Tory knew she had superstrength all along or if it manifested just because Cally was so damn annoying?

Oh, and Rasselas: only a coward would say such a thing. Clearly, your comment is worse than Hitler. As was my lunch.Posted by Hayden Childs on 2008-04-21 18:05:00

I like it when people on the Internet call each other cowards. To quote Jimbo on The Simpsons, "Because it makes me feel like a big man."Posted by Rasselas on 2008-04-21 16:33:00

I guessed that Cally would take her baby to the airlock as soon as she learned that Tyrol was a Cylon.

There is a big difference between infanticide and the murder/suicide that Cally was attempting. Cally has always hated the Cylons, so it makes sense that she would hate her baby, yet she has been trying to be a good mother and so she knew she would not have been able to live with herself. I don't see this as particularly cowardly, because it wasn't committed in reaction to the greater events. It was, to me, a perfectly logical development in Cally's storyline. Sure, they gave some indication that she was suffering from post partum depression (which often goes unrecognized), but I don't think that was her problem. Her problem was finding out that her baby was half something monstrous and unimaginable. Plus she's always been nuts.

My greater take is that the writers killed Cally in response to the fans. I am one of the Cally haters and I cheered when Tory snuffed her. They didn't need to kill Cally for the greater story--or at least they didn't need to give her a whole elaborate episode. This episode was a gift to the fans. This mama says thank you.Posted by annie on 2008-04-21 01:19:00

Thanks for the reviews. You've consistently given me a new perspective on each episode so far this year.

I'm no parent and I've never been in a war zone nor have I ever spent years of my life running from genocide, one of the last members of my race trying to survive in an uncertain future.

But I really wasn't surprised when Cally walked into the airlock with her kid. I imagine finding out that the man she'd married was secretly a Cylon and that her child was an abomination was probably more than her fragile mind could take. She needed out of all that horror.

Trying to compare her situation to someone living quite comfortably in this country day to day seems ridiculous to me.

I never really liked her character particularly but I understood her. I think she was emblematic of the way many people would deal with a situation like that: terrified and unhappy but continuing to do their job one day to the next. Not everyone joins the military to go to war or die for their country.Posted by Anonymous on 2008-04-21 00:49:00

I watched the episode last night, and before getting into the Cally discussion again, I want to say how much I loved seeing Lee stick it to Roslyn when she tried to embarrass him in the quorum. Call him "junior" and effectively tell him to shut up, will she? Well he just handed her a can of worms that she'll have no fun at all dealing with. I also adored Richard Hatch in this ep--he has done really good things with his character.

Now, as to Cally: one thing that strikes me as totally bogus with her situation is how isolated she is. Living on a ship like Galactica, the problem you would have is never having space, never being able to get away from everyone else. Showing Cally as alone with the tot, all the time, just doesn't ring true for me. Cally had skills that they would still need, wasn't she still working, on the roster or whatever you call it? (I mean, isn't that why she ended up on the crew that almost died when there was some bulkhead venting problem?) So, the events of this episode seem to show her as a "stay at home mom" which of course she couldn't be. She would have co-workers she could vent to, and she would have other mothers that she could talk to about kid stuff, that she would meet when dropping off and picking up the little one from the daycare. It's very easy for young mothers to go a bit nuts from the isolation, but I just don't see that happening on Galactica.

Why didn't anyone else notice the change in Cally? My impression has always been that units look after each and look out for each other, and if Cally was struggling, her co-workers and friends would step in to give her a hand, even if Galen was oblivious.

There are no explanations of Cally's isolation that make sense to me.

In my first response, I didn't mean to say that we'd all commit murder-suicide, I meant that most parents choose not to be do-nothing whiners. Ordering adult offspring (Lee's no child) into battle, or putting ourselves in harm's way to protect others, are not equivalent actions/decisions to what Cally did in this episode, and it's odd that you would compare the two. How is committing suicide and killing the baby, who is innocent of anything, going to help anyone or prevent any bad thing from happening?

Frankly, after the initial shock wears off, what's so bad about Galen being a Cylon? Doesn't Cally already have a great example of a very stable, loving human-Cylon marriage with Helo and Sharon?

I want to know if/how Victoria gets away with murdering Cally. It's interesting how she's using the Cylon revelation to turn her life into an audition tape for "Girls Gone Wild". And I loved the snippet from the preview with Galen refusing to canonize Cally.Posted by Joan on 2008-04-21 00:43:00

Anonymous: After all, of the four hijacked flights on 9/11, only one saw a passenger revolt.

You make a good point and it's a hard one to assess or even discuss without taking risks to offend.

However, I will try. And to begin, I will risk offense by saying that those who attach importance to Flight 93 as compared to 77, 175 and 11 haven't read the Congressional Report or the FAA investigation.

There is some evidence that the hijackers of AA Flight 11 killed a former Isreali Special Forces operative Daniel Lewin when he attempted to stop the hijacking. Other passengers, according to phone logs, considered an assault on the cockpit to regain control, but it was too late.

Passenger Brian Sweeney on UAL Flight 175 also repoted that passeners were in position to retake the cockpit, but again, too late to act.

The only plane where there is no evidence of an organized attempt was AA Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon.

In the cases of Flight 11 and 175, there may not have been enough time even with an organized attempt. Or there might have been a lack of aggressive leadership. To say that there wasn't an attempt is contrary to the facts as reported by passengers in phone calls from the planes. With Flight 77, there probably wasn't time. Also there situation was different - the passengers and pilots were all in one part of the plane under control of two hijackers. The other flights, the passengers were all over the plane.

Nobody knows what would have happened if there had been more time - perhaps it might have ended well - nobody knows. The action was taken in the case Flight 93 there was an hour and ten minutes to act from the beginning of the hijacking to it's final conclusion, the others were in the vicinity of 30 minutes or less.

Which brings me round about to my major point which is Cally is a coward. There was more than one occasion in which she failed both herself and others even when the threat was real and looming. She just flat out refused in the face of all evidence to act. And that's a coward. It's not a failure of being human - most humans will rise to the occasion as evidenced above.

Anonymous: The survival instinct is not always going to win out over the deeper psychology of an individual

Bullfeathers as my Maternal Grandfather used to say in polite company. The survival instinct is called flight or fight - everybody has it, everybody uses it. When confronted with a threat to survival you either run like hell away from the threat or you turn and fight. In some cases, you do both - it's called retreat or as Major General Ollie Smith, USMC said when withdrawing from Chosin Reservoir "Retreat? Hell, we're attacking in a different direction!". (Sorry, had to put that in there - being a former Marine myself, that quote always amuses me.)

Cally's survival tactic was to stick her finers in her ears and shout nah, nah, nah, nah when confronted - she just continually refused to accept what was happening instead of taking action.

Simple - she was a coward - no other way to put it.Posted by Sheik Yerbootie on 2008-04-20 23:26:00

Not to drag this into a 9/11 debate, but I believe the reason Flight 93 was the only hijacked plane that saw a passenger revolt was because it was the only one whose passengers were aware of the fate of the previous hijacked flights. Up until that day, throughout the history of aviation, the key to surviving a hijacking was to sit still and do what the hijackers said, knowing that at some point once they landed in Havana or Islamabad or wherever, you'd eventually be set free in exchange for something else. Part of the reason the post-9/11 security focus on hijacking has struck me as so fatuous is because I very much doubt that anyone will ever be able to successfully hijack a plane in this country ever again without being beaten to death by the enraged passengers like something out of 28 Days Later.

That being said, you're right about about Cally being interesting because she's not a hero. Most people aren't!Posted by Sean T. Collins on 2008-04-20 23:20:00

How many people on Flight 93 were parents? I know at least a few were. I don't believe any had their children with them, but those who were parents made the decision to risk making their children motherless or fatherless in order to do what they believed was a heroic act and try to fight the hijackers.

Cally saw herself as being in a very similar situation. Addled by drugs and her persistent lack of self-confidence, perhaps, but after learning her husband was a Cylon she believed that the heroic act would be to take her life and that of her inhuman (to her mind) child, thereby frustrating the Cylon plan.

How many times did Adama order his son into a deadly situation? Or his daughter in all but fact, Starbuck? Many have risked their lives and those of their children to fight the Cylons and Cally felt herself doing the same. It may have been the only moment in her life where she felt empowered to do something useful and meaningful.

As to the author's "Cally is us" point, I am surprised at the resistance to it in the comments. Not all human beings are heroic figures. LOTS of people are whiny, lack self-confidence, and become self-destructive when faced with overwhelming odds. All of us know several such people. Some of us may even be such people.

Humanity is flawed, and not everyone can take the pressure. The survival instinct is not always going to win out over the deeper psychology of an individual - and Cally's psychology, the show has repeatedly demonstrated, is VERY persistent and powerful, even if most viewers hated it.

After all, of the four hijacked flights on 9/11, only one saw a passenger revolt. The other three did not, and yet nobody has chastised those passengers for their inaction.Posted by Anonymous on 2008-04-20 20:24:00

Anonymous: What does 1701D mean? Thanks.

The USS Enterprise - NCC-1701D.

Moore was a writer on that series I believe.

Or director - something like that.Posted by Sheik Yerbootie on 2008-04-20 18:47:00

Thanks for the write-up.

I think that once most people go back and view the series as a whole, they will find the Cally character a lot more sympathetic.

I remember watching Saving Private Ryan as a teen and getting so frustrated with the Jeremy Davies character. Seeing that movie now, especially in light of our current wars which are a lot more questionable in intent than WWII, makes me appreciate what the writer was trying to do with that character - have the one person in the group who was asking "why?" and trying to apply the rules of peacetime to wartime and being frustrated, horrified, and sickened by the sheer terribleness of it all.Posted by Siddhartha on 2008-04-20 17:37:00

What does 1701D mean? ThanksPosted by Anonymous on 2008-04-20 16:27:00

joan--I don't really mean that most of us would take our kids to an airlock and jettison them out of it; I think it's pretty clearly established at THAT point of the episode that Cally's just about completely gone and unable to handle the long string of revelations of what happened to her. Her decision to kill her kid stems more from something like mental illness (and the paranoia pills) than anything else. The one thing I've always thought they developed nicely about Cally in the background is that she IS a pretty good wife and mother--she's just not up to dealing with being married to one of the show's heroes. She wants a nice stay-at-home guy. In the prior seasons (specifically seasons one and two), though, Cally HAS been a little whiny and self-absorbed and more interested in her own personal dramas than the universe-spanning one surrounding her. I totally get why some (like Sheik) find that incredibly annoying, but I find it honest that this sort of person would be on the fleet. Myself, I'm sure if I were in a similar situation, I'd get on board with the program, but that doesn't mean I'd have stuff to complain about along the way.Posted by Todd on 2008-04-20 04:46:00

Before I launch into this, did you catch the 1701D reference when Cally opened the note in her hovel? Or on the weapons bay door?

Interesting take on Cally.

I would have to say that Cally, instead of being representative of "us" is more representative of somebody everybody knows. The type of person who expects a bowl of chocolate ice cream and instead is handed a bowl of cold stale oatmeal.

You do what you have to do when the situation requires it and Cally failed miserably in most instances when being strong was necessary. She wasn't as much an object of hate as pity - or at least as I saw her character.

With respect to "the reality is that most of us would probably be Cally" I strongly disagree. If most of us are Cally, then the human race is well and truly screwed.

Cally was a coward and not even a very good one - meaning that she wasn't a Rincewind, for example who is an accidental hero. Of all the characters of BSG, her's was the most unredeemable because of that cowardice. Even the attempt to soften that cowardice with a backstory of drug abuse (no other word for it) fell flat because the use of mood altering druge did nothing for Cally - she was still the same character as she was when she started.

With respect to the rest of the episode, it's my view that TPTB are just killing time and filling air. I'm just not that interested in the story or the characters anymore except for one thing - who is the Final One.

That's probably the only reason I'm still watching.Posted by Sheik Yerbootie on 2008-04-19 22:41:00

It's more comforting to watch Battlestar and imagine that we'd be Adama or Starbuck or Roslin, but the reality is that most of us would probably be Cally.

OK, I haven't seen this yet; it's queued up on the TiVo for later, but I had to respond to this. I hope this doesn't make me sound like a jerk, but I have to ask, Todd, do you have any kids?

Because once you're a parent, you don't have the option to be a Cally. If we're attributing Cally's whininess to mental illness and depression, that's one thing. But if it's Cally's choice to whine, that's a different thing. And no sane parent ever makes a considered choice to kill her own child, so just from what you've written, I could argue that Cally was nuts and that explains her behavior from day one, including marrying Tyrol after he beat the crap out of her.

Maybe this episode is redemptive of Cally after all, but not in the way you think. I'm not being romantic or naive in believing that most of us would not be whiners in a BSG-type situation. At least, we wouldn't be whiners for long. Whiners tend to get themselves killed quicker than other folks. Parents live for their children, and do what it takes to survive, including not whining.Posted by Joan on 2008-04-19 21:58:00

This is an excellent take on the episode and on the Cally character. I have never agreed with the fandom's hatred of her - I think you've done a good job of pinpointing why she was so disliked. She is a real person, who behaves like normal people (angry, overwhelmed, feeling powerless and frustrated, lost in a world where momentous things are happening that she cannot control).

BSG is at its strongest when it forces the viewer to confront reality. And that's why this episode was such a good one - it forced the viewers to confront the reality of human behavior.Posted by Anonymous on 2008-04-19 21:55:00